For anyone interested, I have an ocr pipeline running on rented GPUs, doing around 1000pages for 0.05-01 usd with around 0.8 seconds per page with full bounding boxes support for grounding.
If you’re interested you can find contact to me via this profile.
Accuracy is truly what people die for in the OCR game. Price isn't the primary function here.. it's an equation of price, accuracy, speed, and in mayn cases regulation.
Tbf even with tesseract you already get shit ton of accuracy and you can probably do these 1000 pages for way less than 3.5€. For 3.5€ you can spin up a cloud instance with 8vCPU+32gb on gcloud for 11 hours (or 11 instances for an hour) which can do way more than 1000 pages per hour on tesseract. It takes you around 6 second per page +-4 seconds start/stop depending on what you are doing on that instance size without too much optimization (you can probably even run multiple processes on a single node)
At this point I lost all hope for Europe playing any significant role in the AI race. If that’s a good or a bad thing I don’t know, but it seems to me like that’s the reality.
True, but that isn't EU/US/China, it's OpenAI/Anthropic/Grok/ …/DeepMind (based in UK)/… DeepSeek
With a lot of Chinese nationals in American companies, and an American corporation owning DeepMind, and a lot of people very upset with all of them at the same time, this is very messy.
The non-doom scenarios include "utopia for all", and "power flows to investors, not citizens of whichever nation the winning model's corp. was registered in".
Independently, "oh look all the investors went bankrupt" can happen in both "doom" and "normal technology" timelines.
Yeah? And here I've been a happy Transkribus customer for some time now. If there are better models or interfaces out there for analyzing historical handwriting, I'll definitely take a look.
I've got a scan from a book that I OCR with new releases. Ligatures, critical sigla, Fraktur letterforms, subscripts, superscripts, etc.
Nothing special about this model for overly-detailed work like mine.
It's been a while since I last tested (and discontinued my subscription), but the "pro" models from OpenAI dominate. Not surprising, given the price difference, but it would be nice if an OCR-specific model could perform better. It's worth mentioning that even the highest-end models do a pretty poor job with intricate text like mine.
Yet: how is pricing?
Evaluating contents and routing appropriately isn't a new challenge in OCR, one of the oldest fields of applications in ML.
Thus, how do the smaller open models perform in tandem with relatively pricy $/pg models & APIs?
Your use case is remarkably rare relative to the volume and price sensitivity of enterprise data warehouse ops.
I got the opposite experience very recently : tried to OCR a bunch of handwritten emails addresses with chatGPT and I had to make so many corrections that I gave up. Whereas Mistral nailed it on first pass.
> the "pro" models from OpenAI dominate. Not surprising considering the price difference, but it would ne nice if an OCR-specific model could do better.
I haven't been impressed with any of Mistral's models. They obviously realized that they couldn't compete at the frontier so they decided to go for smaller focused models but even those have not been that good.
I've been experimenting with using NuExtract this week on locally OCRing bank statements that don't have a predefined document structure. It's way better than Tesseract or a generic vision-enabled model. It runs great on a single RTX 4090 at the modest throughput I need.
Their hosted, API-based service is something like a third of the cost of this model.
How does this compare to Baidu Unlimited OCR. I've been very impressed with Baidu and it's essentially free to run on a decent computer, other than electricity costs.
If you’re interested you can find contact to me via this profile.
3.5 usd/1000 pages is just too expensive…
With a lot of Chinese nationals in American companies, and an American corporation owning DeepMind, and a lot of people very upset with all of them at the same time, this is very messy.
Race dynamics increases p(doom) for everyone.
The non-doom scenarios include "utopia for all", and "power flows to investors, not citizens of whichever nation the winning model's corp. was registered in".
Independently, "oh look all the investors went bankrupt" can happen in both "doom" and "normal technology" timelines.
Nothing special about this model for overly-detailed work like mine.
It's been a while since I last tested (and discontinued my subscription), but the "pro" models from OpenAI dominate. Not surprising, given the price difference, but it would be nice if an OCR-specific model could perform better. It's worth mentioning that even the highest-end models do a pretty poor job with intricate text like mine.
I haven't been impressed with any of Mistral's models. They obviously realized that they couldn't compete at the frontier so they decided to go for smaller focused models but even those have not been that good.
Their hosted, API-based service is something like a third of the cost of this model.
After stuff like Chat Control I think they're obviously seeing a big demand for this kind of "internet safety" technology in Europe.